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		<title>A misunderstood reading assignment &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2017/04-April/26.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>A misunderstood reading assignment</h1>
			<p>Day 00781: Wednesday, 2017 April 26</p>
		</header>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		My mission for the day was to cash that bond I found in my files a while back.
		Or maybe my mother found it in their files?
		I don&apos;t exactly recall.
		In any case, it was made out to my birth name, so it&apos;d be easier to cash it now than after I&apos;ve fixed my legal name.
		The process took a while, but was smoother than I feared it&apos;d be.
		I was prepared to have to try a few banks before finding one that&apos;d take it, just to name one thing that could go wrong, but that wasn&apos;t necessary.
		The bank that issued my credit card took it without problems.
		Due to how long I&apos;d waited to cash it (I hadn&apos;t even <strong>*known*</strong> about it until recently), it was worth almost twice its face value.
		Now I need to get the school to reissue that check, and I should be free of things that bind me to my birth name.
		By that, I mean things that prevent me from changing it; my identity will never be rid of my past, nor is being rid of my past in any way my goal.
		If I wanted to be rid of my past, I probably wouldn&apos;t keep a public, daily journal.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		I finished up my discussion assignment today:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			What made Athens the weak link in my eyes was their poor decision-making.
			They&apos;d managed to put themselves in a position of high power and influence, but they allowed their emotions to get the better of them.
			If a mere rude gesture from an ally is enough to lead you to cause your own downfall, you&apos;re not very good at controlling your emotions or your pride.
			Sooner or later, Athens was going to cause its own downfall unless they first learned to deal with reality better.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			You do have a point.
			Perhaps the other city-states would&apos;ve lead the league to disaster sooner had htey run the league instead.
			I hadn&apos;t thought of it that way.
			So while Athens was to blame for the league&apos;s downfall, perhaps they weren&apos;t the weak link after all.
		</p>
		<p>
			While we&apos;ve come far in many ways, in some, we still haven&apos;t.
			Like you said, the people of the Poleis were greed, selfish, and power-hungry.
			That&apos;s no too far off from how people are today.
			Our technology has evolved since then, but our own evolution has been quite slow.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			You make a lot of great points.
			Athens and the league did fall to Sparta and their league, but before that happened, the Delian League was successful in a number of ways.
			Without the league, it&apos;s possible that Greece would&apos;ve fallen to Persia long before Sparta was the main threat.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			The city-states may have had an equal vote at first, but that was before Athens basically took over the league and made it their empire.
			As far as is concerned democracy, I think the Delian league failed.
		</p>
		<p>
			The Delian League did succeed in promoting trade between city-states though, and the common currency was a great example of that.
			It was sort of like the modern Euro.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			As long as the Delian League had their common enemy, Persia, they worked together.
			They fought against Persia and successfully drove them off.
			Once Persia wasn&apos;t a threat though, that&apos;s when things fell apart.
			Athens took over the formerly-communal fund and demanded tribute from the other members of the league.
			Without their common enemy, Athens seems to have no longer thought they needed to respect the other city-states.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		After that, I took the graded quiz.
		That didn&apos;t go well.
		Most of it was on things I didn&apos;t see in the readings.
		Something&apos;d gone wrong.
		I went back through the reading assignment instructions, and it turned out that not only had I missed that one of the assigned sections was supposed to be multiple pages, but also that the page linked to in the instructions wasn&apos;t even one of the pages I was supposed to read.
		I read not only less than I was supposed to, but also the completely wrong material.
		I&apos;ll have to rememebr to bring up the bad link come course review time, but also, I need to more carefully read the assignment directions.
	</p>
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